Prospectus Idol

Round Five - History Week

by Dave Pease

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Hello, and welcome to another exciting week of Prospectus Idol, where we pit a gaggle of promising contestants against each other in a quest to find our next feature writer here at Baseball Prospectus. I'm Dave Pease, and-say, have you lost weight? You're looking great this week!

Our remaining contestants were looking great this week as well-or at least they were looking the way they wanted to look. (Hopefully there's some relationship between the two.) There were fewer constraints than normal on them this week, and we're hoping you find they took advantage of the format.

This week's format, from the virtual pen of judge and managing editor Christina Kahrl:

For your next topic, you're being let of the leash a bit, having put all of you through a programmatic ringer in terms of writing Player Profiles. We want you to show us-and the voting public-what you can do when you're doing things your way, but with one limitation:

From baseball history from the 19^th or 20^th centuries, pick a player, team, event, season, or issue on the subject of major league baseball, and do whatever you please with it. If you pick a player as the object of your focus, say to talk about his Hall of Fame case, or to do a Goldmanesque retrospective, do not pick an active player.

As usual, there was a soft 2000 word limit, and contestants were encouraged to include any charts or graphs they needed and to think outside the box.

Speaking of thinking outside a box: I'd like to take a question from last week's voting intro article by taking a question or comment you have about the contest and answering it in this article. Please do submit anything you'd like to be considered for next week's article in the comments section. Let's start it up:

BP, another vote to get all seven of these guys on staff. Sign 'em up!-BurrRutledge

We anticipate working in the future with several of the non-winners of this contest. Things are in progress. We agree, this is a great idea. And Richard, I don't know, is that really the right way to solve your problem?

Enough with the preliminaries though, right? You're all here to see, in addition of the ads from our generous and attractive sponsors, the entries to Prospectus Idol: Anything Historical Week. Click here to visit the Prospectus Idol page. The judging panel has been joined by baseball history maven Steven Goldman of "You Could Look it Up." Be sure to vote by Tuesday, June 22 23, at 8:00 p.m. Pacific, and allow a few minutes for our server's fluttering clock.

(Just kidding-I just synced the clock.)

Dave Pease is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @davepease
Click here to see Dave's other articles. You can contact Dave by clicking here

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Richard Bergstrom

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I'm guessing you mean the "NEW COMMENT" suggestion thing when talking about my problem, because I do have quite a few problems, some of which are more obvious than others, but still, there are other, hidden, deeper-down kinda problems that you might not have noticed, merely guessed at, or just kinda hoped I had, but I can't be sure because even if I think I know what you might think my problems are, I am sure that if I knew what you think you knew about me, you'd think the knowing would be a problem too but problems shouldn't be treated in a vague or superficial manner because some problematic people have real feelings and some real people still have problems like the idea that I could keep this sentence going for another few hundred words or so, but I'm eager to start reading and commenting on this week's submissions but I hope you don't think that's a problem.

*slaps himself in the head*

I'll just use a "Match Case" find, and it's good to hear that there will be opportunities for the non-winners too.

Jun 21, 2009 11:34 AM